Take a Walk!

It’s closer than you think.

Locals and greater Atlanta area neighbors love how vibrant downtown Woodstock has become. Amazing restaurants, shops, trails and events are drawing locals, day-trippers and even travelers from far away in greater numbers.

Two common misconceptions voiced by residents, more frequently around town and online, are: “Woodstock has a parking problem” and “Woodstock is a victim of its own success.”

A study conducted last year show midweek and on weekends there are generally several hundred vacant spaces around downtown. There are 1,700 parking places in the downtown district – of those 1,300 are public and 400 are privately owned.

The core parking areas on Main Street, East Main Street, Chambers Street, Wheeler Street, Mill Street and the City Center offer 780 spaces. About 280 of those are on-street spaces, and 500 are in parking lots located just a block off Main Street.

While on-street parking is roughly 80 percent occupied at peak times like lunch, the parking lots average only 10 percent to 25 percent of capacity. So, if you’re willing to take a few minutes and a few steps, you can take your pick from the 300 to 450 spaces available.

The city has added signs (look for the large blue circles with a capital letter P) along Main Street, Towne Lake Parkway and Arnold Mill Road, indicating the locations of public parking lots. There’s a great map of downtown parking areas on the Woodstock trolley webpage.

In addition to the core parking areas studied, there are an additional 180 spaces available to residents in the evening and on weekends at the Woodstock campus of Chattahoochee Tech, when classes aren’t in session. There’s a trolley stop in front of the campus, but it’s just a six-minute walk from Chattahoochee Tech to that frozen margarita on your favorite rooftop bar. When you look at it that way, it’s a four-minute walk from the lot at City Center to the window of your favorite food truck on Wall Street.

The city continues to improve walkability in our community by developing new signage. Look for directional signs coming soon that will tell you how many minutes you are from your favorite places downtown.

A favorite Woodstock small business owner recently put it perfectly when he said, “Woodstock doesn’t have a parking problem – we have a walking problem.”

Walk Woodstock. It’s not too far.

By Stacy Brown, contributing writer and marketing and tourism coordinator for the City of Woodstock.